I do believe if you saw me today, you’d say that I’m absolutely beaming with delight.  We had a large paid search campaign for a client of ours targeting the Thanksgiving holiday and now that all the data is in, I’m pleased as punch to say that for a campaign that had impression levels that were above the Account average, we scored double digit CTR’s. Excellent work, pat ourselves on our backs, a job well done, correct?

Well, no. Actually, it should be a “NO!,” and definitely a “NOOO!” if you ask my boss.  But I don’t know if I can write that.  The reason that the buck doesn’t stop at the CTR’s performance is because we are well beyond the era of judging a campaign by impressions, clicks and CTR. We’re not doing ads in newspapers, radios and magazines, we’re Search Marketing, and quite frankly, search marketing should be held to a gold standard because of its ability to exact a response or action beyond any other marketing medium (in general) besides perhaps face-to-face sampling programs.

I will try to illustrate with flowing, painted words the reason Search Marketing should move beyond that bygone era with a hypothetical story from a fictional client’s point of view:

I just took out a huge loan against my house to start my own business. I’m going to sell widgets. BUT, I don’t sell run-of-the-mill widgets, I sell luxury widgets! Widgets polished to such a shine that they feel creamy in your hands.  I’m literally betting my house that when consumers find out about my widgets, they’ll never go back to the other widgets again. I decide that I’m going to use search marketing to reach my consumers and hire a search engine marketing company to handle the initiative. I need to go big and hire experts on this because my house (and most probably my marriage) hangs in the balance.

So imagine now, that the Search Engine is the street that my business is on. Our store is established in the Widget selling district (and for those of you who aren’t familiar, the widget district is right next to the garment district in NYC) and the search engine marketing company is a whole army of people on the street with sandwich boards directing people to my store.

All the people on my street are seeing my sandwich boards (impressions) and you know what? My sandwich boards are nice and a ton of people are coming in to my store (clicks) and my sandwich board people tell me that 25% of people on the street are coming into my store (CTR).

That’s where the bygone era stops – and with 25% CTR, they pat their backs and walk away.

As the store owner, I’m thrilled that 25% of the people walking down my street in the widget district are coming into my store, but the problem is, I can’t tell who just walked in off the street because they knew of my store compared to who saw a sandwich board and walked in. I also can’t tell what the people are doing in my store. Are they stepping in and just leaving because they don’t like my store (bounce), are they walking down all my widget aisles and seeing all my widgets in a decadent array of designer colors, and if they are, which aisle do they like the most(click path)? And ultimately, are they touching my widgets? Buying my luxurious widgets? Signing up for my Weekly Widget Newsletter? Watching my sales people demonstrate the buttery smooth Widget (all conversion types).  I’d also like to know how much I had to spend to get one person to buy my widget so I know if I should keep the sandwich board people or not (cost per conversion).  These are just some of the basic things I, as a business selling a product, would be interested in knowing if I had an actual store. So as you can see, stopping at impressions, clicks and CTR doesn’t really help me connect the dots as to whether my marketing efforts are helping or hindering.

So let’s map that back to my stupendous Thanksgiving search promotion and what does that mean for the client?  Well, that’s proprietary company information…HA!

Happy Holidays, everyone!